The shift from waiting for certainty to building structure saved me.
March 2020. My roommate was diagnosed with cancer in London. I was supposed to be with him, but I was stuck in Bangalore.
A two-week vacation had become months of isolation. A wait where every single minute felt like years.
Every part of me wanted to go
But every part of the world said: No, you CAN’T.
Uncertainty is not just dangerous; it is suffocating.
When my friend was diagnosed with cancer, I realized how pathetic I am at handling uncertainty.
Here’s what I learned in those months when I was forced to stay at home.
1. Rumination Doesn’t Solve Uncertainty — It Feeds It
People were watching their favorite movies and web series.
But I was stuck on the travel websites, refreshing the page and waiting for updates from the airlines.
When is the first flight?
What did the PM say?
What if my friend doesn’t get any treatment?
How can I relax and enjoy when he is fighting there?
I thought I was thinking logically — anticipating every issue.
Working through every detail.
But my logical thinking wasn’t logical at all.
It had become rumination — leaking into everything
My Work. My routine.
My training. My relationships.
People were suffering from my overthinking more than I.
But when I saw that hours had turned into days, and I had not done anything —
When I saw that my relatives were stonewalling me.
That’s when I realized — I am just spraying negativity everywhere.
That’s when I realized:
Uncertainty cannot be solved by thinking or making scenarios. It absorbs every ounce of energy and spreads into every other area of life.
2. Letting go of questions that do not have any answers is an important skill to learn
I had no answers to questions about the flight, the travel ban, my friend’s condition, and other logistics.
There’s a specific kind of torture in wanting certainty and having zero capacity to get it.
You can’t solve all the problems.
You can’t get all the answers.
This is what helplessness looks like.
We are helpless most of the time, but we only feel its gravity in some situations.
That’s when you realize — no matter how resourceful you become, you can’t get answers to all the questions. You can only decide what you do while you wait.
3. You Can’t Control Outcomes — Only Your Days
I had given up after trying many permutations and combinations.
I realized I was drowning.
Not because of the situation. Because I was waiting for an answer that wasn’t coming.
So I stopped asking when the flights would open. And started asking: What can I actually control right now?
I segmented my days into small blocks. Work. Exercise. Calls. Rest.
I wasn’t doing it because I felt productive. I was doing it because the alternative — ruminating in circles — was killing me.
Here’s the truth:
I can’t control the flights. I can’t control the cancer. I can’t control the borders or the timelines or the outcomes.
But I can control: How I spend my time. What I focus on. And the energy I bring into the room.
Small wins.
Daily rituals.
Controllable things.
Not because they solve anything. Because they keep you moving.
4. I can’t control the content of life, but I can control its structure.
I couldn’t control whether I could take my friend to the hospital.
I couldn’t control the government’s decisions.
I couldn’t control what happened next.
But how I spend my time, I can control.
I can control the reassurances I can give to my friend.
I also couldn’t control his anxiety.
But I could control my daily routine.
My wake-up time, my sleep.
My focus time blocks. The content I consume.
Allowing myself to grieve purposely
Allowing myself to sit with difficult emotions.
This is structure. This I can control.
So, whatever situations my life gets filled with, I can promise myself to show up within this structure.
Structure isn’t a cage. It’s the foundation that kept me standing when uncertainty tried to knock me down.
And when I was standing, I could handle whatever came next.
5. We Live With Uncertainty Every Day — We Just Don’t Notice Until the Stakes Get High
That experience revealed something I didn’t want to see:
I was terrible at handling uncertainty.
But here’s what else I learned:
We live with uncertainty every single day.
We don’t know what will happen in the next five minutes. We don’t know what will happen next year.
We just don’t notice it until the stakes get high.
When the stakes get high, we panic. We imagine worst-case scenarios that may never happen. We torture ourselves with questions that have no answers yet.
But uncertainty doesn’t disappear because you stare at it harder.
What helped me:
I stopped looking for answers. The structure that I built elevated my emotional state — hope, gratitude, joy — not because I was pretending everything was fine, but because negativity is contagious.
I refused to drown the people around me.
The structure didn’t eliminate uncertainty. But it gave me a way to function inside it.
What This Means
When life feels uncertain now, I don’t look for answers first.
I build structure.
I focus on what I can control.
I create routines that ground me.
I protect my emotional state because I know it affects everyone around me.
The uncertainty doesn’t go away. But I’m no longer paralyzed by it.
If you’ve ever felt stuck waiting for answers that never came, you’re not alone.